It is actually, if you check out the kinds of things they vote for and pass into law they are things that have these effects. Even if their real goal is making rich people richer, they are also hellbent on making poor people poorer in the process.

The south is also a good portion of the bible belt and tends to be less educated and more religious, resulting in people who vote republican because they are either easy to fool (the elected republicans want to mock the poor for being lazy as opposed to helping them escape poverty) or they vote based on "values" such as hating gay people or abortion.

Sound logic doesn't play a part in many votes that go to republicans, and that is the point of the republicans pandering to that group of voters.

The point is that people with less money are more likely to spend money than people who already have money. The main fallacy with trickle down economics is that if you give rich people money they magically create jobs. This is not the case at the highest levels of wealth generation because those types have no incentive to create jobs, merely to create more wealth. This often means putting that money into the stock market which may have some minor effect on job creation but not creating real demand which actually fuels the economy forward.

We may need tariffs to encourage spending on American goods but with the global economy being a real thing, we may not be able to use tariffs in a politically viable manner.

Well in a elitist republican utopia there would be no social welfare programs, the only welfare programs would be for corporations so that none of them have to have any kind of taxes or regulations. This would magically eliminate poverty because trickle down economics says so. Your average person is smarter than this but you wouldn't get elected on the republican ticket without drinking the upper class kool aid.

profits are a sacred cow I get that, but the reality of the modern world is that profit is too highly concentrated in the hands of the few. It doesn't matter how few slave laborers you can get at pennies an hour to build your stuff if no one has the extra money to buy your stuff with.

Poverty can be seen by some as being anything other than republican. The current right wing party has a mindset that life is very easy, because for many of them it is. They are blind to the reality of how most Americans live because many of the successful types fail to understand their success and believe themselves to be self made when in reality they had miles of opportunities and help along the way that most Americans don't have access to.

This leads them to believe that because you aren't rich you must be lazy and poor. When half the country's politicians believe that 47% of the country is lazy and poor, they don't understand the problems and cannot fathom viable solutions.

In reality, being poor or not depends on how you micro manage your budget. Most poor folks are in situations that require more money than they can make due to socioeconomic standing and lack of upward mobility for the bottom floors of our society. For example the unemployed person with no skillset and minimal education is much less likely to get a job because they have no particular skills or knowledge that makes them stand out.
For many people, their lives are lived paycheck to paycheck. I would qualify them as poor, though they may not make the official cutoff. This range covers people that make $13 / hour or less with 14 / hour being the stabilizing point where people can really get to a point where they can afford to have a modern standard of living and spend some extra money beyond the funds they use for basic survival.

The problem with this common sense method of fixing the economy is that increasing wages results in lower profit margins in the short and possibly mid term. Profit margins are a sacred cow of the current world order and they are not to be harmed for any reason.

Inflation would occur to counter act wage increases because companies would want to maintain profit margins, which would make wage increases less effective than they should be. If we could avoid this inflationary effect, or minimize it then wage increases of significant amounts would improve the overall economy long term.

Ideally, in many areas that are not large cities, moving people up to a $13-$15 per hour minimum wage would be a significant improvement in the economy because tens of thousands of people would now have more money to spend on non-survival related goods and services.

Depending on how expensive a given area is, a person could spend upwards of 15-18 grand a year just on basic needs such as various insurances, car payments, rent, water / electric, phone, internet access, gas and food. This amount is roughly 80%-140% of what most people make in a year which leaves almost no room for non-essential spending.

Essential spending can keep an economy slogging by barely; you need real increases in non-essential spending to have a good economy.

Corporations refuse to acknowledge this fact and continue to lay off people and reduce incomes to increase profit margins in the name of efficiency.

The problem is the most efficient company possible is one that does as little innovation and competition as possible with as few workers as possible being paid as little as possible.

This results in companies that do not want competition so that they don't have to spend money on R&D to innovate. Then these companies move to as many rent extraction models as they can get people to pay into.

This is highly efficient and highly profitable but results in stagnate economies with low wages. Eventually there will be extreme stratification in which there literally exists only a few billionaires and their companies with everyone else reduced to minimum wages as low as is possible to reinforce the rent extraction models of these companies.

No. The issue is corporate greed not hatred toward Obama. Business works in a particular way, and that generally tends to result in immoral actions on the part of corporations for the sanctity of maintaining and increasing profits . Corporate profit does not equal societal improvement and thus it puts the wealthy against the rest of us in many cases.

high unemployment is bad because then you have a significant portion of the populace being unable to participate in the economy which slows it down, and eventually could stagnate it then finally cause it to cease functioning at all.

That makes sense, republicans generally would want to be around like minded people with similar life experiences meaning that the areas high in republicans are likely be lower in socioeconomic diversity.

Republicans loathe the poor so why would they choose to live near them?

MJ stocks on penny markets are all about hype and very little about legitimate success and profit. I recommend only using money you are willing to lose when it comes to the stock market and especially penny stocks.

PHOT, HEMP, MJNA, GRNH, TRTC, are a few that are viable to profit from but generally only if you can buy in closer to 52 week lows because those stock tend to trend back to low values when the hype season cools down (November - Janurary due to legislation being voted on and put into effect which results in spikes of pot stocks).

Typically buying around august and selling between Nov. and Jan. would have been profitable the last few years. GRNH for example was around 2 cents in august 2013 and shot up to 0.92 cents in the first two weeks of Jan. 2014. Keep in mind this is all about hype and not legitimate success.

You might also look into tobacco companies that could rapidly move into pot if/when full legalization occurs since they will be the most likely to have a stable supply.

I think a better option would be similar to New Zealand or Australia (I forget which) where each industry has it's own minimum wage. This would allow various kinds of businesses to handle the costs differently.

As far as a national minimum wage goes, big business will block any significant change because it eats into profits and they will raise prices to cover small changes. This current method will price out small businesses, which is why Wal Mart sometimes lobbies for increased wages.

On to your arguments:
1: Corporations can't lose profits at any cost, and they have severe tunnel vision (they refuse to see that an economy with more people spending more money would result in more profit long term) .

2: This can be solved using my suggestion, not so much in the current system though.

3: The previous poster mentioned the correct answer, a substantial increase in minimum wage is needed and therefor it would effect more than 5% of the workforce. Just because a small portion of the workforce is paid at this level doesn't mean the minimum wage is a living wage ( a living wage depends heavily on area but would hover around $15-$20 an hour in many places).

4: The main goal of minimum wage should be a working economy where people can have a living wage as opposed to "fixing" the nebulous concept of poverty. This mostly comes down to semantics.

5: Bonus points for a living wage include no longer having to spend so much on supposed "entitlement" programs because more people can support themselves. The problem with this is Trickle down economics, the upper class wants a lower class that can be beggars so they can feel "better" than someone else. The whole concept of trickle down economics is predicated on the idea that the upper class can rightfully avoid paying a living wage to the working class in order to hoard the wealth for themselves. Granted trickle down economics is usually semantically a bit more generous than the version I've laid out here, but that is because the people that are for TDE aren't willing to admit why they want it.

6: Here again the alternate model with multiple minimum wages for different industries could help. Also a major overhaul in healthcare to make it actually affordable to individuals without the aid of their employer would go along way into making this viable for all businesses.